Article excerpt

THOMAS MANN

Eros and Literature

A biography by Anthony Heilbut

618 pages, Knopf, $40

THE LIFE of Thomas Mann exemplifies the paradox of modernism:
bent on creating works of social and spiritual consequence, artists
of the earlier 20th century were constrained - by the very
societies they hoped to reform - to stay at a distance from the
core issues of sexuality and the intimate politics of erotic life.

Thus Henry James, creating his greatest works about the same
time that Thomas Mann was attracting worldwide attention with
"Buddenbrooks," could never bring himself to describe overtly the
act of love and created an elaborate rhetoric in which his own
sexual inwardness could be sublimated. Thus Mann himself, staid and
straitlaced in his public appearance; courted and married a
charming woman and fathered six children, the oldest three of whom
were, like their father, homosexual.

The conventional wisdom about Mann has been that he struggled
to accommodate his personal feelings and his ardent German
nationalism to the conventions of the novel as he knew them,
injecting his own struggles as an artist into characters like the
eponymous Tonio Kroeger and Gustav Aschenbach in "Death in Venice."

To show that this conventional view is incomplete, Anthony
Heilbut has written a densely detailed account of the first
two-thirds of Mann's life, the years of his greatest successes,
leading up to the publication of "The Magic Mountain" in 1924 and
his winning the Nobel Prize in 1929. Heilbut's point, apparent in
his title, is that Mann's sexual turmoil - the result both of the
necessity of hiding his homosexuality and of the very intensity of
his sexual appetites - was the most significant force in the
shaping of his fiction. …